felicity
x
The Pokémart is usually quiet.
Tucked into the corner between Birchwood McAlister and Malachite Lane, two of the more barren streets in abysmal Viridian, it's no surprise that there are hardly any customers. There's barely enough people in the tiny town to keep its economy afloat. The land isn't nitrogenous enough for many crops to grow outside in the old pastures, where the grasses have been chewed thin and the soil run for its nutrients. Outside, in the old pastures, is a golden-green savannah, scorching, natural grain sprouting up in patches on the landscape and glittering with dew in the morning. From my place standing inside the Mart in the early morning, I can see it glowing, rolling atop the hills in unbridled glory, bright enough to be aflame.
And from standing inside the Mart in the early morning, toward the middle of my short shift before classes start, I can see her, wandering among the silt that flies by passersby's ankles like time, burning in the gray pre-dawn light. Gray-green eyes, like the land itself, observe the land and the old, gargantuan trees that shade the edges of the small not-oasis of a town from the beating sun above, a drum in the sky. Hands pale like cream, calloused at the finger pads and scarred at the palms, push back tendrils of smoky brown from a face like the rolling grasses themselves, sparse and proud. The woman always wanders in, just after five-thirty, and takes her time to meander in the air conditioning for a few minutes, then takes up a bottle of lemonade and strides back out. Sometimes she leaves something behind, a few Poké or a set of keys on a grappling clip that I know she usually keeps on the strap of her bag from her visits in the winter.
Leaf is well-known around the town. Quiet and perhaps a bit shameful, she avoids interaction, usually - she chooses to remain around the Gym Leader, young in years and old in skill, and those who wander in the town not to remain for long. She doesn't stick around, often, and walks around Viridian in the early morning and the late nights. And twice a day she walks in, always during my early-morning and late-night shifts, and picks up a bottle of lemonade.
This time, it's a bit later when she comes in. She left her keys last night, almost eleven-forty-five, and I silently wonder how she managed to get home. Maybe she stayed at the Leader's household. Or maybe she didn't stay anywhere at all.
I can just see her, walking with her nose down and eyes at the flying dust, brushing back her hair when it tousles at her cheeks. Tucked at her side is her bag, and her fingers clutch a Pokéball tightly, fondly. I take the good two minutes between the time she appears in my vision and the time she steps into the shop to find a marker. It rests easy in my hand and I scribble a nervous hello onto the wet paper wrapped around the bottle I've been setting out on the counter ahead of time for a few months, now.
Leaf walks in, hair pinned back, shorter than before. It's messy and makes her look even younger, but it suits her, in the same odd way that her long hair had, too. Her thumb traces shapes idly on the surface of the little metal sphere in her hand. She repeats it until she's done wandering around the Mart and moves to the counter. Her face, flushed with the heat before, is paled again, cool from the AC. She pulls open the hangover flap of her bag to get her wallet out and I catch a glimpse of a few Pokéballs, small and full. They twitch sometimes, rattle against one another, impatient to taste the air.
She tosses twenty Poké on the counter and I slide her the bottle, note facing away from her, and her keys. The silver grappling clip clicks as she hooks it back in its rightful place on her bag's strap, her chin ducking slightly in a grateful nod.
And then she's gone, Pokéballs in her bag and feet steady on the road, sipping a lemonade as the gray sky overhead fades to yellow-orange.
x
A/N: SURPRISE I'm back
and you thought you'd seen the last of me